It’s a double whammy, folks! Numero uno, another candidate in the Near-Profanity Sweepstakes, F-word division. It’s a category already overpopulated with entries like Fresh ’n’ Easy’s “It’s about time life was this f’n easy” and Booking.com’s “Look at the booking view!” (For more, see my post from June 2013.)

And numero two-o, it’s another example of the funny uses of funin the language of commerce. We’ve seen comparative fun (funner), superlative fun (funnest), and even super-comparative fun (funner-er). Now Toyota has transformed fun into a reflexive imperative verb.

You may recall that Toyota isn’t the first mass brand to hop on the F train. Last year Jell-O verbed funin a boundary-pushing campaign called “Fun My Life.” The #FML hashtag made it clear that Jell-O knew exactly which boundaries it was pushing. Bye-bye, Bill Cosby.

Despite the boggling number of Urban Dictionary upvotes, FML does not mean “Fix My Lighthouse.”

What else can we say about Toyota’s creative effort? Well, the copy avers that “The spirit of playfulness is alive in this small car.” The spirit of punctuation, however, is on its last wobbly legs.

Sophisticated dramatically styled and compact. We’ve designed our best small car ever, now it’s time you got involved.

The idiocy of this slogan truly boggles the mind! I’m an avid user of the longer F word in the right context, but Toyota has shot itself in the foot with this one...not funny, not clever, won’t sell cars.

April 11, 2014

Arduinois “an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” (Source: Arduino.cc.) The company was founded in 2005 in Ivrea, a town of about 25,000 in northern Italy; its products are popular in the worldwide maker community. The company is Arduino; its microcontroller board is “an Arduino.”

Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world by posting it on the Net.

The first few times I encountered the Arduino name I associated it with “arduous,” which is not only conceptually inaccurate but historically and etymologically false. Arduino is not related to Latin arduus (high, steep). Rather, this very 21st-century company and its primary product are named for an 11th-century monarch who ruled for just two years.

Here’s how IEEE Spectrum tells the story:

The picturesque town of Ivrea, which straddles the blue-green Dora Baltea River in northern Italy, is famous for its underdog kings. In 1002, King Arduin became the ruler of the country, only to be dethroned by King Henry II, of Germany, two years later. Today, the Bar di Re Arduino, a pub on a cobblestoned street in town, honors his memory, and that’s where an unlikely new king was born.

The bar is the watering hole of Massimo Banzi, the Italian cofounder of the electronics project that he named Arduino in honor of the place.

The personal name “Arduino” is derived from the Germanic name, Harduwin or Hardwin, composed from hardu “strong, hardy” and wini “friend.” (Source.) It has cognates in French (Ardennes, site of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II) and English (the Forest of Ardenin Warwickshire, the setting of Shakespeare’s As You Like It).

Arduino uses the .cc domain extension, the country code for the tiny Cocos Islands, a territory of Australia. It’s the preferred domain of many Creative Commons (open source) projects—another example of when a non-dot-com domain is the more appropriate choice.

As for Ivrea, its name comes from the Latin “Eporedia.” Arduino isn’t the first technology company to have made its home there: the business-machine company Olivettiwas founded there (as a typewriter manufacturer) in 1908. Known for advanced industrial design, Olivetti was also a technology pioneer: the company’s Programma 101, released in 1965, is considered the first commercial desktop personal computer. Olivetti was sold to Telecom Italia in 2003 and rebranded as Olivetti Tecnost.

Ivrea is also known for a peculiar carnival celebration, the Battle of the Oranges, with roots in the 12th and 13th centuries. Fest 300, hotelier Chip Conley’s world-festivals website, describes it thus:

It’s a familiar story: commoners rise up against an oppressive ruler. At the Carnevale di Ivrea, however, the battle isn’t waged with guns and swords—oranges are the weapon of choice. Every year, the tiny northern city of Ivrea in the Turin province stockpiles 500,000 kilograms of fresh oranges for Battaglia delle Arance (Battle of the Oranges), a re-creation of a historic fight between townsfolk and a ruling tyrant. Teams wage a full-on fruit war, and not even a red-capped declaration of sovereignty can protect you from getting juiced.

The carnival is connected to the Christian calendar; this year it took place between March 2 and 4, the Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. But its rituals have pagan overtones:

The festival concludes with a sword-wielding Violetta watching over a scarlo, a pole with juniper and heather bushes. If the scarlo burns fast and bright, the future looks good; a slow burn is a bad omen for the coming year.

Here’s a lovely thing from the University of Nottingham’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures: Words of the World, a series of short videos in which language experts tell the stories of words adopted into English, from aficionado to zeitgeist. Click on a word in the crossword-like grid to learn its story. (Via Language Hat.)

And speaking of the history of English, whatever happened to the passival tense? Jane Austen used it in 1807 when she wrote in a letter: “The garden is putting in order.” But by the end of the 19th century that construction had been replaced by the progressive passive we use today (“The garden is being put in order”). Not without a lot of sturm und drang, though. I learned about it from Mike Vuolo, until recently the producer of NPR’s On the Media; he’s developing a podcast called Lexicon Alley to explore the byways of language and devotes an installment to the passival—much more fascinating than you’d guess. And here’s an older Language Log post about 19th-century outrage over the newfangled progressive passive. It was ever thus: language always changes, and people always hate change.

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Back in the world of commerce, the Olive Garden restaurant chain tried to introduce new dishes with Italian-sounding names—soffatelli and pastachetti—that turned out not to be Italian at all, just “rooted in Italian inspiration,” according to a spokeswoman. The fake names (falsetti?) flopped. Linguist Arnold Zwicky twirls a fork around the issue, and for good measure investigates pepperoni (another American invention) and diavolini.

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Cloth diaper brands: real or fake? Take the quiz at The Hairpin. (Footnote: For several years I wrote copy for a diaper-cover company called Biobottoms. I see the brand still exists, although under new ownership. Good product. And yes, we got endless grief over the Biobottoms name, for which I was not responsible.)

June 15, 2010

He disappeared from magazines about six months ago. But his quixotic saga lives on. In January, Rosetta Stone asked fans to continue the story of the farm boy and the model. By Jan. 29, when the contest ended, there were 286 stories on the Rosetta Stone site, most of them with happy endings.

But wait, there’s more! In December 2008, Minnesota Public Radio’s Jeff Horwich wrote a song about the farm boy/supermodel romance that he performed at a company cabaret. Nice rhyming of “impress her” and “undress her,” Jeff!

The hardworking farm boy even casts a shadow over a rival language-software company, Instant Immersion, which in recent weeks has been running this homage (oh, all right: low-rent knockoff) in The New York Times:

February 13, 2008

Names that must have seemed like terrific ideas in their languages of origin:

1. I'm not 100 percent sure, but I'm guessing that in the original Italian, Milldue is a contraction of mille due, which means "one thousand two." The Italian pronunciation of the brand would be meel-DOO-eh. Unfortunately, this manufacturer of expensive bathroom fixtures--I repeat, bathroom fixtures--now sells its wares in English-speakingcountries, where the pronunciation is likely to rhyme with "ill poo" and the association with unwelcome greenery (note sponsored links) is not a big image-booster. (Hat tip to Going Like Sixty.)

2. Our Italian comrades have also given us a kitchen-appliance company with the unfortunate name of Smeg. A U.S. distributor helpfully tells us that the name "is an acronym for Smalterie Metallurgiche Emiliane Guastalia"--translated, "an enamelling factory in the village of Guastalia in the province of Emilia in Northern Italy." Smeg's products are stylish: check out these '50s-design refrigerators, which are cute, petite (9.22 cubic feet), and pricey (about $2,000). But oh, that name. There's just no way around the association with genital secretions. In the kitchen. Ick.

3. Apparently Incesoft, a robot manufacturer based in Shanghai, based the first half of its name on the acronym for Infinity Nature Communication Experience. But like The Name Inspector I can't help seeing "inappropriate intrafamilial contact" there. On the other hand, I was charmed by the earnestness of this awkwardly Englished product description: Online Robots Union is trying to be a good robot platform for company's and individual's robots. Company and individual developers can submit their robots here, share your ideas and enjoy funs. Here is also a good marketing platform for your products and services.

4. Anyone up on his or her Black Death lore knows what a bubo is: a swollen inflamed lymph node, especially in the groin or armpit.(From Greek boubon, meaning groin or swollen groin.) The adjectival form is bubonic, as in bubonic plague. In Latin, however, bubo means owl, which is what gave someone in California's wine country the bright idea of naming a winery Bubo Cellars.

Jessica Stone Levy, a trademark lawyer who blogs at Beauty Marks, reports that she "happened upon a bottle of Bubo Pinot Grigio today, and recoiled in horror." Jessica writes: "Listen, your product name can have a suggestive and evocative meaning in a dead language, and on that basis make a great trademark, but that's all worth nothing if the mark means something completely disgusting in English."

August 16, 2007

A few weeks ago I wrote about the French idiom "to call a cat a cat"--the equivalent of "to call a spade a spade" in English. Thanks to commenter Tim Hicks, I now know that the French also say "a cat in the pocket" to mean "a pig in a poke." (In German it's "a cat in a sack.") And I learned that when a French person has a cold, he has a cat--not a frog--in his throat. (No frog jokes, please.)

Literally, it means "There's no tripe for cats," and Deirdré notes that it's used "when there's absolutely no hope that you'll get what you want." (I imagine the closest English equivalent would be "There's no rest for the weary," but it's a poor comparison.)

The deal is this: Tripe (that's mammal tummy to you picky eaters out there) is evidently so prized by Italians--and so coveted by their feline companions--that the humans feel compelled to guard it jealously and gloat about it. (Clearly, "trippa" lacks the secondary meaning of "tripe": utter nonsense.) I loved this story Deirdré tells:

At the European football championships in Athens (spring 2007), a group of Italian Milan fans unfurled a banner saying (in English) "There's no tripe for cats," meaning that there was no hope for the other team to win, though probably only the Italians understood it that way.

Indeed--although while investigating this idiom I discovered The Cat's Tripe, a British blog whose tagline is "What's left after the Cat is gone." But its author seems to have vegan tendencies. I cannot speak for his cat.

P.S. The English language is replete with feline idioms, too, including the one I've used in the title of this post. ("The cat's pajamas"--an American expression meaning "a remarkable person or thing"--dates back at least to 1900, as does "the cat's meow.") For a long list of cat expressions, see this entry in The Mavens' Word of the Day, from Random House. Update: that link is broken now, so try this list of cat idioms from The Free Dictionary. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, originally published in Great Britain in 1870, lists about 50 cat idioms, including "a cat may look at a king," "no room to swing a cat," and "enough to make a cat laugh." According to Gerald Cohen of the University of Missouri-Rolla, a participant in the American Dialect Society listserv and editor of Studies in Slang, the expression "more than one way to skin a cat" actually refers to catfish.